on tuesday night at rugby practice, it's after dark but still balmy, and the moon is rising over the east river. the right side of its face is illuminated, pointing through space towards the invisible sunken sun. I know where I am in the universe. when the ball flies into the space between the moon and my hands, I reach out and catch it.
wednesday morning, I take the subway to the bus to an unfamiliar neighborhood in the bronx. the directions tell me to walk east from the bus stop to get to the middle school, and the numberless streets surrounding me give me no clues as to my orientation. but it's early in the morning just a week after the equinox, so I know my shadow must be falling away from me towards the west. I turn until the sun is in my eyes and my shadow is stretched out behind me, and walk east to school.
wednesday afternoon, after meeting up with a colleague, we walk downhill and over the major deegan expressway. like me, she lives in brooklyn, and as she looks around at the hilly bronx horizon she says, "it's funny how much higher up you feel here." I look through the sidewalk and cars and highway to the metamorphic fordham ridge formation beneath us, all that piled-up gneiss so much taller than the sedimentary seam beneath my apartment where the till left behind by a long-melted glacier gives way to a flat outwash plain. "not so funny," I say.
thursday night, in bed with sleeping thomas, I feel his arm wrapped around my middle, his fingers in their familiar place, lightly aligned with the bones in my ribcage. is there something about us by now, like the complementary coastlines and matching fossils of africa and south america, that reveals how we fit together even when we're apart? I think so. I feel so. I fall asleep.
[ 30.3.07] · [ ]
happy equinox! this sweet little green-capped cupcake was originally conceived as part of my saint patrick's day tripartite dessert spread, but between the pop-art flowers on the cups and the fact we still have half the batch stored in the fridge, I think it is well suited for celebrating the onset of spring.
and about time for spring it is. what with the ice storms and my baking endeavors, I've spent most of the last three days inside, eating little other than batter and frosting and cupcakes. we've already cooked and consumed all our weekend greens from the farmer's market, so I think I'll go out into this sunshiney day of equal night and find myself some vegetables. which I will eat raw without baking them into anything.
[ 20.3.07] · [ ]
in seventh grade on tuesday I was walking around the classroom, chatting with students as they worked. one girl, apropos of nothing, called out to me, "miss, you's irish?" I was two tables away, so I didn't yell back, but I smiled at her and nodded in affirmation. I's irish.
I don't know why kids are so interested such things, but they're always pretty good at guessing that I'm irish -- much better than they are at guessing my age or my religion -- so something about my heritage must be working for me. I don't really know what it is. the tip-tilted nose and pale eyes and freckle-friendly skin, I guess. surely it's not any of my names.
saint patrick's day is a good one to contemplate your irish ancestry, if you have it. in most ways I am not very good at being irish: I'm not much of a beer drinker, and even less of a christian; I don't eat meat or butter or cream; when I dance (or move in general) my arms flail and swing rather than staying clamped to my sides. I'm not particularly moved by the traditional celtic aesthetic of knots and crosses and whatnot. I'm certainly not possessed by a longing for peaty sod. I'm the girl with the irish citizenship, but many of my friends embrace the culture more completely than I ever will.
in spite of all that, it's important to me, this irish ethnicity of mine. because it's really the story of how my grandmother's family of farmers came to be new yorkers. so today I'll make colcannon and wear green, and though I still can't bring myself to take more than a few sips of an irish stout, I can bake it into my cupcakes. happy saint patrick's day!
[ 17.3.07] · [ ]
holy shit. have you seen the bigotry spewing from garrison keillor these days? (seen first at the stranger, but spreading rapidly.)
I've never been a big npr person, unlike many of my friends, but this has pretty much put the nail in that coffin for me. no more prairie home companion, ever.
obviously the most horrific part of garrison keillor's piece is his straight-up homophobia and the way he writes about gay parents. but I was also offended, on a more personal level, by his description of big families:
Under the old monogamous system, we didn't have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck. Today, serial monogamy has stretched the extended family to the breaking point. A child can now grow up with eight or nine or 10 grandparents -- Gampa, Gammy, Goopa, Gumby, Papa, Poopsy, Goofy, Gaga and Chuck -- and need a program to keep track of the actors.
although, overall, my own extended family is remarkably free of this multiple-marriage structure, I'm partnered with a boy whose parents have each been married more than once, so I've become familiar with the holiday "apportioning" practice. and, yes, at one point early in our relationship, tom did draw me a little diagram to help me understand all the branches of his family tree. I'm in no place to speak about the effects of living through your parents' divorce and remarriage(s), but you know what's good for children? (and people in general?) teaching them how to feel proud of their families and to accept love wherever it may come from. if tom and I ever become parents together, our child will have at least six grandparents, and as far as the child is concerned, I'm failing to see the downside there.
back to garrison keillor. I was also angry at his claim that a bunch of immigrant schoolchildren benefit from his existence:
I told them a story about how, back in the day, we were cowboys and rode horses across those flat spaces, rounding up our cattle, even in blizzards. For proof, I sang a cowboy song with a big whoopi-ti-yi-yo at the end of each verse and I got them all to do clip-clops and whinnies... They seemed to understand it all, at least the clip-clop part, and they are better children for having met me.
seriously, asshole? seriously? they're better for knowing a guy who thinks the word "family" means one thing and one thing only? who teaches them to wax nostalgic for the way the country was before they arrived? who inexplicably believes that having interests and emotions of your own makes you unqualified to be a parent?
I woudln't let him in my classroom, that's for sure.
[ 15.3.07] · [ ]
Sunshine Week is a national initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information..
(it's easy to forget sometimes, but I don't actually hate my country.)
a few weeks ago I was interviewed by a ninth grade student about the school lunch program. he wanted to know why school lunches are usually so bad. so I told him a little bit about how repeated budget cuts have made it so that a school typically has no more than seventy-two cents to spend on each student's meal, forcing them to use the government-subsidized meat & dairy and highly processed food products, most of which arrive ready for the microwave. the most healthful foods like fresh fruits and vegetables take too much time and money to prepare, and since the nutrition guidelines for school lunch make little mention of actual nutrition -- just food groups -- the most cost-effective way to feed everyone is with food that is high in fat, cholesterol, and sodium. etcetera.
the boy was very polite and professional on the phone. his teacher told me later that once he was finished with the interview, he and his group members were completely outraged that the government would do such a bad job taking care of all its schoolchildren while handing over profits to giant food corporations.
the real point of teaching for me is not to produce a bunch of high school graduates who know the difference between granite and gabbro, or even who know how human civilization contributes to global climate change. the point is to help them develop the ability to make the world the place they want it to be. obviously I think science is a big part of that.
my job is harder when the government turns its back on science and reason, when it deliberately lies and spies on its citizens, when it puts the needs of corporations over those of people. and when my job is hard, my students' job is next to impossible. it doesn't have to be, though, and it won't be forever. if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be an educator.
[ 12.3.07] · [ ]
I drank coffee by accident today. the drinking itself wasn't accidental, but there was plenty of happenstance leading up to that point.
for the past few days I've been pondering my vices, the things I do even though I know I really shouldn't. not like biting my nails, because that doesn't really hurt anyone (and I am making slow progress in my quitting attempts). like drinking through a straw, an indulgence I allow myself every so often because it so thoroughly satisfies my oral fixation, even though I know the one-time use of a plastic straw is both wasteful and wholly unnecessary.
today during my break between seventh-grade classes, I went to starbucks, even though I am generally opposed to starbucks and definitely not a coffee drinker. but I wanted a warm place to do some work and I always feel a little awkward in the common spaces of schools where I am not an employee. (next time I will just go sit in the lobby of the natural history museum, which is almost as close to this particular school as the nearest starbucks.)
it was snowing, it was lunchtime, I felt like I had to buy something to justify my presence, I already had my bottle of juice tucked into my backpack, and the food offerings at starbucks are pretty horrific. so I asked for a soy chai latte. (I don't like soymilk but my occasional tasting of tom's foods have led me to develop some tolerance for it.) somewhere between the cash register and the barista, my chai became a plain soy latte, and though I know they would have fixed it for free, I didn't want to be responsible for the outright squandering of all those resources -- coffee beans, coffee roasting, coffee transport, coffee brewing, soybeans, soybean processing, soymilk transport, soymilk refrigeration, soymilk frothing, disposable cup -- so I just took it.
I drank almost the whole thing and when I was done I felt completely drugged. tripping. the flavor wasn't unbearable, though reminiscent of burned pie crust, but afterwards I felt like I was going to spit my heart out of my mouth. I felt like I had plugged each of my fingers into a power source with a different voltage. I felt like every wavelength of thought and feeling was vibrating through my brain at a different frequency, and the interference was turning it all to nonsense.
becoming caffeinated, I decided, was my penance for giving in to the tempation of vices and things I don't really believe in. when my coffee buzz wore off I would be healed, absolved. I spent the rest of the afternoon waiting to become my better self again, trying not to open my mouth too far lest my tingling teeth fall straight out of my gums.
I was born with a little round patch of brown just above my right hipbone, as if someone had spilled a drop of creamy coffee on my pink baby skin. that has always been just the right amount.
[ 7.3.07] · [ ]
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